“You’re allergic,” Dwayne said.
29
Bad Fish
“Who knew?” Jimbo said. He was shaking from chills.
“We have to medevac your ass, bro.”
“Fuck that shit.”
“Sorry. My call, Jim.”
Dwayne tapped out a text update and set it to repeat. He carried Jimbo down the slope to the beach in a fireman’s carry. He spent the day setting up a temporary camp and preparing the raft. When the field opened, he only had a thirty-minute window max to get Jimbo and the raft out into the vapor cloud and back aboard the Raj moored three thousand years away on the other side.
He kept Jimbo as comfortable as he could while waiting for the ping. Dwayne wrapped him in blankets when he was chilled and doused him with cold seawater when he was hot. Jimbo was barely conscious most of the time. The knee joint vanished as his leg swelled larger and larger.
It was full dark when the transmitter pinged. The ping was followed by a text.
STAY PUT. COMING TO YOU.
Dwayne locked on the spreading white cloud just beyond the breakers. The island was bigger now than it would be, but the nearness of the field meant that the Raj was pulled in tighter to the shore than it was for the first insertion. He heard a whining noise coming from the heart of the mist. The whine turned to a growl and the prow of the Raj’s long motorized inflatable broke from the fog heading for shore.
Dwayne met the boat at the surf and Caroline leaped out. She was in cutoffs and a Manchester United football jersey. Boats was manning the tiller, with a hand to the twin outboards.
“Jesus fuck, that was a ride!” Boats shouted. “I feel like hammered shit!”
“I’ll need help with Jimbo,” Dwayne said. “He’s not ambulatory.”
Caroline helped Dwayne pull the boat ashore while Boats dropped to all fours and heaved up his guts in the receding surf.
Boats recovered and trotted up the beach after Dwayne and Caroline. The ex-SEAL and ex-Ranger carried the unconscious Jimbo down to the inflatable and loaded him on board. Boats climbed in as Caroline let go the line she’d secured to a peg driven in the sand.
“Who’s going and who’s staying?” Boats called.
“Take Jim. I’m staying,” Dwayne said.
“So am I,” Caroline said.
“The hell you are!” Dwayne turned to her, but she was already backing up the sand away from the surf. She had a bag over her shoulder that Dwayne had not seen her toss out of the boat.
“We don’t have time for this!” she called back. “Get to the Raj, Boats! You have to go now!”
Boats revved the outboards and let the tide carry him back to the line of white breakers. “I know what to do for your friend!” he hollered as he turned the prow about. He gunned the twin motors and skipped the boat over the swells until the dense mist swallowed him.
They didn’t talk until they reached the hide. “Before you start,” she said before he could start. “You couldn’t stay back here alone, and there isn’t anyone else, is there?”
He decided to give it up. Dwayne hated her being here and hated even more that she was right.
The next morning, they saw a sail against the sky.
30
Alabama Again
“You never worry about worms?” Lee Hammond said.
“What worms you talking about?” Chaz Raleigh said.
The big old buck was an eight-pointer and would dress out at one-twenty minimum. Chaz had nailed it on the fly with an old .303 bolt action that used to belong to his dad. A heart shot dropped the buck in its tracks. Instant kill meant sweet meat.
“Hunting out of season. You know, when it’s warm,” Lee said.
“Deer got worms all year round. Body temp of a deer doesn’t change with the weather. I thought you said you hunted?”
“With my uncles every winter. When it’s cold. Too cold for worms.”
“Never too cold for worms inside a deer, dickhead,” Chaz said and hauled on the line he’d tied around the buck’s back hooves and slung over a branch. He slit the throat clean and let it bleed out a while. He gutted it and tossed the organs aside.
“You have coyotes here?” Lee said.
“Some. Wild dogs, mostly,” Chaz said.
“Your uncle doesn’t have a dog.”
“He was K-9 in Vietnam. His dog stepped on a mine. Uncle Red said he could never own a dog again.”
“So, he ask you to leave the guts for the packs?”
“Naw. I just do it because I’m a lazy fucker,” Chaz said. He laid out a tarp and lowered the hull of the deer down onto it. He was wrapping the carcass when the cell on his belt beeped three times.
“That’s Red’s ADT alert,” Chaz said as he ran back toward the farmhouse.
Twin explosions sounded through the trees. Shotgun blasts, one after the other. Chaz pushed rounds into the modified Enfield’s box magazine as he ran with Lee close behind him.
They reached the break in the tree line at the back of the barn in time to see a car neither of them recognized driving away down the gravel drive. Chaz raised the rifle to sight after it. He put a silver-dollar-sized hole through the trunk lid before it slewed around a curve and behind the trees. Lee reached out and pulled the barrel down as Chaz was working the bolt. Chaz glared at him before turning to run to the house.
The screen door hung broken from the hinges. The wood was frayed around it where double-ought buck tore through it. Uncle Red stood leaning on the kitchen table sucking air in shallow gasps. The double-barrel, still smoking, lay on the linoleum.
Red’s eyes were wide. There was no sign of injury on him. A stroke or his
